Dorothy, Alberrta

"With the maps lost, the voyages

Cancelled by legislation years ago,

This is become a territory without name."

from NOT THE SWEET CICELY OF GERARDES HERBALL

by Margaret Avison

Somewhere in the Badlands Dec. 2019

 "And from the study of things underfoot, and from reading and thinking, came a kind of exploration, myself and the land. In time the two became one in my mind."

John Haines

"Which of the horses

we passed yesterday whinnied

all night in my dreams?

I want that one."

from Stories from Kansas

 

 

More photos from our trip in Oct. these are our friends horses.

 All the quotes are from William Stafford's

Stories That Could Be True New and Collected Poems.

 

"While the earth breaks the soft horizon

eastward, we study how to deserve

what has already been given us."

from Love in the County

"The wild keeps telling us something 

we want to pass on to the world:

Even far things are real.

from Whispered into the Ground

“Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, 

that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons.” 

from My Antonia

 by Willa Cather

My latest photos are from a trip to visit our friends that live in Southern 

Alberta. They live in the true prairie in an area fringed by the nearby 

Drumheller Badlands. And while I love the Aspen Parkland where we 

have built our cabin among the sloughs and the poplars. I will always

 love watching the movement of the clouds, the wind, the shadows,  

the seasons and the migrations that move across the endless sky and 

the vast fields of the open prairie. These photo stem from 

a trip to explore a road cut on the edge of the Badlands.

I am bound to the earth by a web of stories,

just as I am bound to the creation by the very substance and

rhythms of my flesh. By keeping the stories fresh, I keep the places

themselves alive in my imagination. Living in me, borne in mind, these

places make up the landscape on which I stand with familiiarity and 

pleasure, the landscape over which I walk even when my feet are still."

 from Telling the Holy

    by Scott Russell Saunders

"His beak could open a bottle,

and his eyes - when he lifts their soft lids -

go on reading something

just beyond your shoulder -

Blake, maybe,

or the Book of Revelation.

Never mind that he eats only

the black-smocked crickets,

and the dragonflies if they happen

to be out late over the ponds, and of course

the occasional festal mouse.

Never mind that he is only a memo

from the offices of fear -"

from The Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard

Mary Oliver

Not so little Great Horned Owl

Hand Hills Alberta Oct 2014

"Where it not for the way you taught me to look

at the world, to see the life at play in everything, 

I would have to be lonely forever.”

from Lights on a Ground of Darkness

Ted Kooser

Thanks Tim

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor

 towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

from Burnt Norton

             T.S. Eliot

somewhere in the Hand Hills area, Southern Alberta